Accessing GIS datasets from Fortran programs

News from the project

FortranGIS project

FortranGIS project includes a collection of Fortran interfaces to
some common Open Source GIS (Geographic Information System)
software libraries, plus some more Fortran-specific tools.

The libraries interfaced at the moment are Shapelib, GDAL, Proj
and ReadOSM.

Shapelib

Shapelib is a library for
handling ESRI shapefiles, a very common vector file format in
GIS. This Fortran interface covers the full Shapelib API, including
reading and writing of all kinds of shapes and dbf attributes.
All the procedures interfaced in Fortran are documented with
Doxygen.
The Fortran API for Shapelib is stable and unlikely to undergo any
change.

Gdal

GDAL is a library for the
input/output of a number of georeferenced raster (gridded) data
formats. Since release 2.0, this Fortran interface includes bindings
to almost all the GDAL C functions, allowing read and write of
any file format supported by GDAL. This incidentally allows to read in
Fortran also common graphic formats such as jpeg, png and gif.
For some common procedures, a Fortran-specific interface is available,
thus simplifying the work for Fortran programmers.
The Fortran-specific procedures are documented with Doxygen,
while for the procedures directly interfaced to the native GDAL functions
you should refer to the original GDAL C API documentation.

Proj

Proj is a library for
handling a big number of geographical projections and coordinate
conversions. The Fortran interface covers the most common procedures
of the proj library and is considered stable.
Here as well a Fortran-specific interface is available for some
procedures.

ReadOSM

ReadOSM is a
library for extracting data from Open Street Map .osm and
.osm.pbf files which can be downloaded with various tools from
the OpenStreetMap platform. It
is still experimental and is not built by default.

Interfacing to C

The interfacing to the C APIs within this project is done through
the ISO_C_BINDING Fortran2003 intrinsic module. This is supported
nowadays by most commercial Fortran compilers as well as by the free
gfortran compiler. Since version 2.3, FortranGIS makes use of some extra
Fortran 2003 features besides bindings to C, thus gfortran version 4.6
or higher is recommended.

The main hosting for this project is now
Github,
Sourceforge will continue to provide file releases and web pages but
source repository is not updated there.